Meadowlark Lemon

High school

Williston High School

Pro team(s)

Harlem Globetrotters

Hall of Fame

⭐ Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

Meadow George Lemon III was born on April 25, 1932, in Wilmington, North Carolina — the same city that would later produce Michael Jordan — and attended Williston High School, the historically Black institution that served African American students in Wilmington under segregation. He discovered the Harlem Globetrotters as a boy after watching a newsreel of them at a movie theater, wrote them a letter asking to join, and kept the idea alive through a stint in the U.S. Army. In 1954, the Globetrotters signed him. What followed was one of the most joyful and durable careers in sports history. Lemon became the face and soul of the Globetrotters for over two decades: the ringmaster, the comic, the needle-threading passer, the half-court shot artist who never missed when it mattered. He played in more than 16,000 games — in 100 countries, before presidents and popes and hundreds of millions of fans — earning the nickname "The Clown Prince of Basketball." His brand of dazzling entertainment introduced basketball to generations of people around the world who might never have cared about the sport otherwise. He passed away on December 27, 2015, at age 83. He was inducted posthumously into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022. Born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina.